First Sight: A New Way of Understanding Psi

I've embedded a video above of Carpenter describing the First Sight theory, but for those unable to view it, here's a short passage in which he outlines the theory using the analogy of lightning:

Consider physical lightning bolts. For thousands of years they were just about all that people knew about electricity. They were unpredictable, awesome, terrifying and beautiful. The ancients thought that when they erupted, the dormant sky had become suddenly and fiercely alive. Book Cover - First SightNow we understand that lightning is one expression of electricity, and electricity is actually everywhere. Electric charge is a basic constituent of every atom. It helps make up the stuff of our bodies, it connects each synaptic chain. It tells your heart when to beat. As we came to understand electricity we mastered it. Now you hold a domesticated lightning bolt in your hand when you use your cell phone. In a few moments you can use it to speak to someone in Beijing or Adelaide or Buenos Aires. The awesome anomaly is not anomalous at all and we have tamed it.

The lightning bolts that we call paranormal experiences are also surprising and beautiful and disturbing. They shake the ground of solid reality. They seem different and anomalous. According to First Sight theory, they are not really anomalous either. This book is about a radically new way of thinking about these things. It presents a revolutionary understanding of how each of us fits within the world and how we are put together within ourselves. A lot of evidence suggests that the theory is true. In light of this, much of what we normally assume will need to be changed.

First Sight theory proposes that, like electricity, psychic experience is actually going on all the time. Also like electricity, it is almost always out of sight in its functioning. Occasionally, it will be expressed in obvious ways, like lightning bolts, but normally it is unconscious. What is it for? According to the theory, it is the leading edge of the unconscious processes that the mind uses to construct all its experience and all its behavior. Because it traffics with things that have not reached the physical senses, it is our first line of engagement with the world, our first outpost of information. This is why the theory reconstrues what has been called second sight and calls it First Sight.

HOPE is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all Emily Dickinson